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Stanley Kubrick was devoted to images, telling his stories as visually as possible. His images have an arresting power that few if any other directors can match. Dublin-based film critic Paul Lynch may have summed it up best speaking on A Clockwork Orange:

With colour, Kubrick found an alacrity and an arrest in his images that began to transcend the subject material of his stories…Those widescreen shots seem to push the natural boundaries of the screen, to absorb every photon of light. Kubrick wanted to do to his audiences what he did to Alex in A Clockwork Orange: to peel back our eyelids until we are forced to see every beam from the projector. He did not want us to blink.

There is a cold pedantry to his work, an unfeeling, ivory-tower vantage that, when married to the analytical care he took with his craft, can leave you feeling a little cold towards his films.

What is a Cinemagraph?

Cinemagraphs are still photographs in which a minor and repeated movement action occurs. The term “cinemagraph” was coined by U.S. photographers Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck, who used the technique to animate their fashion and news photographs beginning in early 2011.

They are produced by taking a series of photographs or a video recording, and, using image editing software, compositing the photographs or the video frames into an animated GIF file in such a manner that motion in part of the subject between exposures (for example, a person’s dangling leg) is perceived as a repeating or continued motion. (See Tutorial Links at the end of this Article.)

Why, if they all come from the same place, should one go through all of the trouble to put the same source link with every image? Especially when that link comes directly after the blurb and before all of the images.

Well, if you buy into the word ‘photograph,’ then cinemagraph isn’t much of a stretch; take -graph to mean image as in photograph (light image) and throw on cinema-, meaning motion, and you get a word meaning motion within an image — the ‘within’ coming from the fact that most all that I have seen are not entirely animated, only certain areas. Indeed, the effect desired seems to be for the viewer to momentarily see these as still images.

The difference is that in these there are certain parts that are deliberately static. Only one (or very few) elements of the image are actually animated. They’re still GIFs, but can capture magical moments in a movie

Gifs can contain millions of colors and high resolution. You’re just not used to seeing it because most animated gifs that you’ve ever seen were automatically created in a simple frame conversion process. These are manually assembled frame by frame, the first high resolution frame being the entire picture, then all the subsequent frames are only updates to the areas affected by the action in the picture. The silliness of the term “cinemagraph” is debatable, since this process has been around since the beginning of animated gifs in the early ’90s, but the fact is that the vast majority of people never bothered the hands-on approach used by these guys here. An improvement, yes… but still nothing new. Good job on these though!

Well, according to the wikipedia GIFs entry: «[…] The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel thus allowing a single image to reference a palette of up to 256 distinct colors. […] There are at least two rarely-used methods that can generate a GIF that, if decoded according to the GIF89a standard, will produce an animation that ends with a 24-bit RGB truecolor image. […]»

You asked why the transparency option saves so much space, well that’s because of the way GIF works.
A GIF animations works not in discrete frames like a movie, but in layers like a photoshop file.

With transparency disabled the background has to be copied into each and every animated layer, which is more like a movie with discrete frames but it takes up a lot of space because most of the background frame is saved multiple times.

With transparency enabled you’ve got a single background layer which fills the complete frame (the static building) and each additional layer only adds the small animated window cleaners while the space around the cleaners is left transparent, which is extremely easy to compress.

Love the ‘A Clockwork Orange’ images. I’ve only just recently watched this film. Your post is correct. In the images selected here, each tells a tale. If anyone remembers anyone of these films after viewing will be instantly taken to that specific moment in the film. Brilliant and animated captures. Well done!

This is kinda stupid. I mean, they are just animated gifs. I don’t understand what makes these so unique or interesting. I also don’t like how there was a whole term coined for this. And now this guy is gonna get major credit for creating this “concept.”

How is this stupid? It’s just like anything else in this world where someone has improved upon something simple. Sort of like people putting presets on images and calling themselves professional photographers.

Suggestions for Barry Lyndon: Barry overlooking the water from the bridge after his explosive fight with Bullingdon. The card party seduction scene: when Lady Lyndon makes that quirky, lip twisting smirk-siren glance. There are many others. Nora Brady looking down at Barry at the onset of the film…the film lends itself well to many. If only I could do these!

About the tutorial:
with a proper tripod you just shoot a video that seems a cinemagraph !
There are no other freezed objects in the scene that can show the difference between a video and a still image with cinemagraph behavior.
After this automatic opinion, the tutorial is a good quality and good speech.

I think this in a way was a terrible gif to start with for your animation. If I was to do a shoot and a tutorial, I’d want better results for myself before going through with all of this.
Good try but in my opinion, you wasted lots of time with it.

[...] from one of the original movie gif tumblrs if we don’t, remember me, comes a collection of 30 Stanley Kubrick gifs that do a wonderful job of showcasing how arresting the legendary filmmaker’s visual style [...]

[...] Pity. I guess we’ll just have to imagine how the late perfectionist and celebrated director would have reacted to a gallery of his most iconic images, downloaded and doctored into infinitely looping, minimally anima…. [...]